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Updating Marx's Concept of Alternatives

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Updating Marx's Concept of Alternatives tripleC 10(2): 555-569, 2012 ISSN 1726-670X http://www.triple-c.at Updating Marx’s Concept of Alternatives Peter Ludes Professor of Mass Communication, Jacobs University Bremen, P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany. [email protected] Abstract: The analysis of Marx’s works will be prepared by outlining a more encompassing research project of intergenera- tional dialogues, in section 1. Section 2 will review Marx’s concept of an alternative, classless society, which was based, e.g., in the projection of rational planning within companies to a national economy - to be revised and updated. Section 3 will discuss how more realistic long-term intergenerational means of orientation and communication of alternatives can emerge. This diagnosis will imply two exemplary and complementary forces calling for alternatives, namely “the perceived risks facing humanity” (Beck) and the enhancement of human rights as global challenges requiring global institutions. Keywords: Alternatives, Classless Society, (De-) Civilizing Processes, Means of Orientation and Communication, Un- planned Processes, Intergenerational Dialogues, Long-term Goals, Multiple Modernizations, Risk Society, Global Challeng- es Acknowledgement: My research into the sociology of alternatives, since the seventies of the past century, gained from discussions with Daniel Bell, Harvard, and Norbert Elias, Bielefeld and Amsterdam. Since 2009, I discussed the more en- compassing project sketched in section 1 in the context of the research centre Humanities, Modernity, Globalization in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of Jacobs University Bremen. Kind thanks also to two reviewers of tripleC. 1. Introduction Since the first phases of industrialization and democratization in the 19th century, many scholars have contributed eminently to interpreting these economic and political upheavals. Prominently among them were, e.g., Karl Marx and Norbert Elias – among the contemporary ones Jürgen Ha- bermas and Ulrich Beck. Which insights can be gained via explicitly constructed synopses of and dialogues between a few of their highlighted perspectives? Which new insights will be gained via and in terms of such an intergenerational dialogue, concerning driving forces and/or impeding forc- es? Such an endeavour leads well beyond one theory tradition alone, even if it is as important as the various strands of Marxian analyses and theories, of Marxist organizations and activities. Yet, from the outset a strong Western bias must be acknowledged, both in terms of the histori- cal phases of industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, education, or democratization taken into account as well as the social scientific theories used to interpret and change social conditions. ”How different would the history of sociology or anthropology have been if Max Weber (say) had come from India, Emile Durkheim from Cuba or Norbert Elias from Martinique?“ (Burke and Pal- lares-Burke 2008, 17) No theory by one author alone can claim to have developed a globally pertinent theory of alter- natives. Yet (Marx 1973: Grundrisse, 77, put into parentheses), “if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.” (Marx 1973, Grundrisse English ed., 159) Therefore, this essay will (1) situate Marx’s concept of an alternative classless society in a network of later attempts at understanding long-term developments and de- tecting alternatives; (2) specify Marx’s concept of an alternative classless society with a selection of highly pertinent quotations, referenced both in the original German and in English, which calls for a complementary update in terms of more recent studies, e.g., by Norbert Elias, Jürgen Habermas, and Eric Hobsbawm; and (3) discuss some chances and limits of alternatives at the beginning of the 21st century in terms of global risk challenges and human rights. 2. Intergenerational Dialogues From Elias’s classic theory of long-term social processes, to be sketched below, including those of more realistic sociological means of orientation and communication, two major components are basic to my inquiry: (1) Individual authors and their works are not the most important or decisive units of analysis, but intergenerational figurations, which combine to new types of insights. (2) Not only the concepts of individual authors and of short-term orientations are at stake, but the very notions of a scholarly “work”, to be transformed in terms of a “collective authorship or mind”. This will lead from a traditional history of ideas to an equal footing of authors from quite different epochs CC: Creative Commons License, 2012. 556 Peter Ludes and thereby a collective enlightenment scope, taking into account long-term ambiguities as well as dis-/continuities, shifts or break ups, i.e. tilting phenomena. This diagnosis requires a concrete research project to enlarge the scope of theory-formation beyond traditional texts and efforts for global knowledge beyond Western biases (Featherstone and Venn 2006; Jin 2007). In order to re-allocate the status of widely acknowledged eminent theoreti- cians – whose special importance for international social theory formation cannot be deepened here - this essay focuses only on Marx’s concept of alternatives, yet in a more encompassing pro- ject on the works by the following eleven theoreticians 1) Karl Marx; 2) Friedrich Nietzsche; 3) Max Weber; 4) Georg Simmel; 5) Sigmund Freud; 6) Karl Mannheim; 7) Norbert Elias; 8) Alfred Schütz (and Thomas Luckmann); 9) Jürgen Habermas; 10) Niklas Luhmann; and 11) Ulrich Beck. As recently examined by Danowksi and Park (2009, 351), “[i]t would be of interest to map the network structure among public intellectuals, based on their co-appearance in the same discussion threads. However, when the study was pilot tested, sufficient co-occurrence of public intellectuals in the same discussion threads was not found to warrant such an analysis”. Their findings show “on the internet, dead public intellectuals have a social afterlife, a sociomorphic quality that continues in cyberspace. This is a cultural domain in which discursive formations involving public intellectuals continue to evolve. The findings relate to the existing body of research concerning evaluations of online discussion” (Danowski and Park 2009, 352). They conclude: “It would be fruitful to […] use more traditional methods of content analysis. While threadedness is a message content-based construct, it is only an indirect measure of content. It is more clearly a measure of the persistence of discussion associated with a public intellectual and related ideas, not the composition of the threads. Their semantic composition would be a valuable component of a broader attention to pub- lic intellectuals and the internet” (Danowski and Park 2009, 353). Intergenerational Dialogues will advance in this direction, exemplifying the transformation of the humanities and social sciences in terms of online sources, discourses, and publications. The con- cept of “dialogues” implies that no hierarchy is presumed or aimed at, but a focus on those theory elements, which combine to innovative synopses, less dependent on their historical or ideological roots. This procedure suspends traditional concepts of biologically and culturally shaped genera- tions, as advanced, e.g., by Karl Mannheim. It deviates from more traditional histories of ideas ar- guing for the priority of certain thinkers, e.g., Fuchs’ (2009) excellent article on Marx and the media. Therefore, the selected works will not be interpreted as distinct outcomes of generation-specific conditions and insights, but as combining to a joint process of intergenerational knowledge creation and reflection, beyond biological time spans – which, nevertheless are taken into account for pre- liminary interpretations and the selection of variations of concepts of, e.g., societal alternatives. A very simple and therefore transparent synopsis of the time horizon of the more encompassing research is sketched in Figure 1 below. Figure 1: A synopsis of eleven selected public intellectuals from Marx to Beck CC: Creative Commons License, 2012. tripleC 10(2): 555-569, 2012 557 If we select only two major concepts for each individual work, e.g., for Karl Marx “classless society” and “alternatives” (as core elements of semantic fields), the number of all possible links between such 22 concepts amounts to 231. This network of concepts is visualized in Figures 2 and 3, be- low: Figure 2: A synopsis of collected writings by eleven selected public intellectuals from Marx to Beck with 231 links for 22 variations of concepts of two selected concepts, emphasis on the authors CC: Creative Commons License, 2012. 558 Peter Ludes Figure 3: A synopsis of collected writings by eleven selected public intellectuals from Marx to Beck with 231 links for 22 variations of concepts of two selected concepts, emphasis on the intergenera- tional network of knowledge creation These figures visualize the increasing interconnectedness of this intergenerational dialogue, lead- ing individual works into the background and the network of concepts into the foreground. Thereaf- ter, similar synopses of online publications will lead to even larger data sets and more complicated visualizations. Already in 1929, Karl Mannheim developed a dynamic synthesis of diverse perspectives beyond class and political group
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